The Giver of Stars(97)

Margery’s face drained of colour. She blinked hard, put out a hand to steady herself. The sheriff caught it.

‘She’s in the family way,’ Alice said, taking her arm. ‘She gets a little light-headed.’

‘And that’s dramatic news for a woman in the family way to have to hear straight out,’ Izzy added.

But the sheriff was staring at Margery. ‘You take that route, Miss O’Hare?’

‘We share the routes, Sheriff,’ Kathleen interjected. ‘It really depends on who’s working that day and how each horse is doing. Some ain’t so good on those longer, rougher routes.’

‘You keep records of who goes where?’ he said to Sophia, who stood up behind her desk, her knuckles tight on the edge.

‘Yes, sir.’

‘I want to see every route taken by every librarian over the past six months.’

‘Six months?’

‘Mr McCullough’s body is in a state of … some decay. It’s unclear how long he has lain there. And his family don’t seem to have reported him missing, according to our records, so we need all the information we can gather.’

‘That’s – that’s a lot of ledgers, sir. And we’re still in a little disarray here because of the floods. It may take me a while to locate them among these books.’ Only Alice was positioned so that she could see Sophia slowly nudge the ledger on the floor firmly under her desk with her foot.

‘To be frank, Mr Sheriff, we lost a good many of them,’ Alice added. ‘It’s entirely possible the relevant entries have suffered catastrophic water damage. Some were even washed away.’ She said it in her most clipped English accent, which had been known to sway sterner men than him, but the sheriff didn’t appear to have heard her.

He had moved around to Margery and stood in front of her, his head tilted to one side. ‘The O’Hares had a long feud with the McCulloughs, am I right?’

Margery picked at a scuff on her boot. ‘I guess.’

‘My own daddy remembers your daddy coming after Clem McCullough’s brother. Tom? Tam? Shot him in the stomach Christmas 1913 … 1914, if I remember right. I bet if I asked around there’d be other bad blood could be recalled between your two families.’

‘Far as I’m concerned, Sheriff, any feud died with the last of my brothers.’

‘Be the first blood feud around here just melted away with the snows,’ he said, and put a matchstick between his teeth, which he waggled up and down. ‘Mighty unusual.’

‘Well, I’ve never been what you might call conventional.’ She appeared to have composed herself.

‘So you would know nothing about how Clem McCullough happened to be brought down?’

‘No, sir.’

‘Tricky for you that you’re the only living person might have had a grudge against him.’

‘Ah, come on, Sheriff Archer,’ Beth protested. ‘You know well as I do that family is proper hillbilly trash. They probably got enemies halfway to Nashville, Tennessee.’

That was true, they all agreed. Even Sophia felt safe enough to nod.

It was at that point they heard the engine. A car drew up, and the sheriff walked slow and stiff-legged to the door, as if he had all the time in the world. Another deputy appeared, and he murmured something in his ear. The sheriff looked up and behind him at Margery, then leaned in for further information.

The deputy entered the library so that there were three of them. Alice caught Fred’s eye, and saw he was as nonplussed as she felt. The sheriff turned and when he spoke again, it was, Alice thought, with a kind of grim satisfaction.

‘Officer Dalton here has just been speaking with old Nancy Stone. She says you was making your way to her back in December when she heard a gunshot and some kind of a commotion. Says you never arrived and that, rain or shine, you had never once missed a book delivery before that day. Says you were known for it.’

‘I recall I couldn’t get past the ridge. The snow was too deep.’ Margery’s voice, Alice realized, had taken on a slight tremor.

‘Not what Nancy says. She said the snow had eased two days past and that you was by the upper levels of the creek and that she heard you talking right up until minutes before the gun went off. Says she was mighty worried about you for a while.’

‘Not me.’ She shook her head.

‘No?’ He pondered this, his lower lip pushed out in exaggerated thought. ‘She seems pretty sure there was a packhorse librarian up there. You telling me then it was one of these other ladies that day, Miss O’Hare?’

She gazed around her then, a trapped animal.

‘You think maybe I should be talking to one of these girls instead? Think maybe one of them is capable of murder? How about you, Kathleen Bligh? Or maybe this nice English lady? Van Cleve Junior’s wife, yes?’

Alice lifted her chin.

‘Or you – what’s your name, girl?’

‘Sophia Kenworth.’

‘Soph-i-a Kenworth.’ He said nothing about the colour of her skin, but rolled the syllables around extra slowly so that they felt loaded.

The room had grown very still. Sophia stared at the edge of her desk, her jaw tight, unblinking.

‘No,’ Margery said, into the silence. ‘I know for a fact it was none of these women. I think maybe it was a robber. Or a ’shiner. You know how it can be up there on the mountains. All sorts going on.’